Posts Tagged ‘Visual Approach for Children with Autism’

ASD Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurological disorder that affects an individual’s ability to interact, communicate both verbally and non-verbally, relate to others, play, imagine, and process information and learn.

Generally individuals with autism spectrum find the world around them confusing and interactions with other people difficult.

Communication troubles are common to all children with autism spectrum disorder. A child with ASD may also display obsessive, repetitive behaviours and can become anxious and distressed over changes in routines.

For parents of children with autism spectrum using visual strategies for improving communication skills as well as teaching social skills can be beneficial.

A Visual Approach for Children with Autism can be introduced to support and teach skills like making friends, improving communication skills, social interaction skills, imagination and play skills.

Typically developing children will naturally learn social and communication skills from their parents, peers, teachers and those around them. This ability is missing in children with autism spectrum disorder this is due to social skills troubles, which are always present in autism.

Visual strategies help autistic individual’s overcome their social skills troubles. A Visual Approach for Children with Autism such as autism social skills stories are implemented easily and need no formal training to use. They can be edited, printed, personalized and are suitable for all ages and abilities.

Autism social skills stories break a skill or situation down into relevant social cues and answer the important “wh” questions – who, where, why, when and what as well as give an insight into the thoughts of those around them. The autistic social skills story is always written in first person text from the autistic individual’s point of view and follows a specific pattern of four main sentence types.

Developed to help teach and support communication skills in children on the spectrum, autism social skills stories are now probably one of the major autism tools used to help teach and support communication and social skills, imagination and sensory processing issues in children on the spectrum.

Autism social skills stories act as a role model teaching specific skills and situations that the child on the spectrum is struggling with, each autistic social skills story can be used on its own or with other stories and is portable making them convenient to use.

Research suggests visual strategies for improving communication such as PECS, flash cards and autism social skills stories can be easily implemented and work.